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Winds of Change in Washington?
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They are not a gale, not even a stiff breeze — more like a zephyr really — but there are winds of change stirring Washington. There are hints that when Republicans return from their travels and their time with constituents they will be ready for some righting of their ship, which has been listing heavily to starboard.
Over in Democratic circles there are hopes that President Obama, presumably buoyed by the fall of Tripoli, will tighten his grip on the helm and begin to assert himself in ways that his party has felt that he has been missing.
The Associated Press released the results of a new poll on Thursday that showed approval of Congress has dropped to 12 percent, down from 21 percent in June, before the ugly debate over raising the debt ceiling. The Associated Press-GfK poll taken earlier this month also showed that the Tea Party has lost public support, Republican House Speaker John Boehner is increasingly unpopular and that people are warming to the idea of not just cutting spending but also raising taxes, just as both parties prepare for another struggle with deficit reduction.
Stuff happens — and when stuff happens, the political dynamic is changed.
An earthquake and hurricane, for example, has convinced people along the East Coast the cutting the funding for the U.S. Geological Survey, as has been proposed, may not be so prudent. Likewise, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration might need full funding.
Enter states in economic shock. From Maine to California, they are bracing for the impact of federal grants drying up.
At least two Republican governors, who were out in front with austerity programs, are looking less sagacious.
New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, a Republican Party favorite, sacrificed a long-planned new tunnel into Manhattan on the altar of economic rectitude, just before it was becoming apparent that the only way government can really create jobs is through big infrastructure projects.
Farther south, in a burst of ideological zeal, Florida Gov. Rick Scott waved off federal stimulus funds for high-speed rail and other things. So the funds traveled up the coast to be plowed into road projects in Massachusetts, much to the joy of Democratic Sen. John Kerry who crows about his state's infrastructure progress. The wily presidential hopeful Texas Gov. Rick Perry denounced the stimulus package and then pocketed $14 billion for his state.
The lesson for those who thought that statesmanship lay in placating the well-intentioned but economically challenged Tea Party movement is that surgery with a machete is doomed to terrible results when a laser scalpel is needed.
Malcolm Muggeridge, the great British essayist and popular philosopher, wrote a prescient essay on the failures of reform. Of 12 major reforms, from the Russian Revolution to the ending of Tammany Hall political domination in New York, people who were supposed to benefit were left worse off.
The latter is an issue that Obama may want to ponder as his health care reforms are implemented. Without a public option to benchmark prices, he may have covered more Americans but, in so doing, allowed for prices to further escalate.
It is by the Republicans that the larger pressure for course correction is being felt. "No new taxes," increasingly sounds about as sophisticated as what spectators to the guillotining of French aristocrats chanted, "Off with their heads!"
The public wants government to do many and mysterious things, like invent the Internet, go to Mars, cure cancer, build better highways, and keep us safe at home and abroad. Whether we enunciate it or not, we want the government to look after us in areas of health, world stature, scientific discovery, defense, and food supply and safety. Business does not do those things, and even the most rugged of individualists cannot do them for themselves.
Ergo, we have to pay for those things and the credit card is maxed out.
Tax is back on the table, if not in fashion. Tax and judicious cuts in spending.
Members of Congress also read the poll numbers. At around 13 percent, their approval ratings do not make them feel good. Nobody likes to be told they are an incompetent bum, especially incompetent bums.
So for the first time there is some feeling that the super committee, which is set to tackle the deficit problem, may actually do something before Congress allows mandated cuts — the machete to start hacking.
Just a little more wind, and a grand bargain will be scented on it. Wet a finger and hold it up in September. — For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate
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Boneyard for the Graybeards
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He moves across the lobby of Washington’s Metropolitan Club with the assurance of a man in his own environment. This is the habitat of party elders, Republican and Democratic. This is their comfort zone– safe, secure, orderly and predictable. This is where graybeards lunch, scheme and reminisce. It is as someone once called it: a hotbed of social rest.
Here on the well-worn Persian carpets, men and women of achievement in many fields, not the least politics, talk over unexceptional food, always with an eye for another grandee who deserves a wave across the dining room.
The man who just entered the lobby is a Republican through and through. He has done a lot for the party; has advised at the highest levels, since the Reagan presidency; and has been rewarded with a major ambassadorship. He will know a lot of people in the dining room on any day and even more will know him.
To dine at the Metropolitan Club is to step back to a time when eminent graybeards—yes, they were almost exclusively men and almost all lawyers–worked behind the scenes to help presidents and their parties. Names like Barbour, Clifford and Cutler come to mind.
Now lobbyists now whisper in influential ears, and the doyens of the Metropolitan Club are not in demand. Like the Georgetown dinner party, some things are now in the past.
There is no time for profound consideration, no time to weigh the data and no time to exercise institutional memory. Omar Khayyam’s moving finger writes very fast now; so to deal with new situations and crises, politicians fall back on old ideology. “Is it progressive?” ask Democrats. “What is the free-market solution?” ask Republicans.
Blame the warp-speed news cycle, and its overemphasis on politics over programs; the quick response over data and rumination. The relentless news machine wants speedy answers, everything in an instant.
A few blocks from the Metropolitan Club, the bloggers and twitterers in the White House press briefing room parse and comment upon the words of press secretary Robert Gibbs just as fast as he speaks. This is a de facto system where the trap is constantly sprung for the gaffe not the substance. If no gaffe is likely to occur, induce one.
Step forward Lynn Sweet of The Chicago Sun-Times with her race-heavy question about the arrest of Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. This happened at the end of the last presidential press conference, when the chosen reporter usually goes for something light or fun. Not Ms. Sweet.
A few seconds at the end of that press conference eclipsed President Barack Obama’s earnest but dull defense of his health care reform proposals; eclipsed the previous 55 minutes. Obama was in a place he did not want to be, and he would stay there for weeks. No time to ask some party elder how best to handle the situation.
If Democratic grandees are sidelined in the new news-driven politics, then Republican statesmen, like the man at the Metropolitan, have been sent into exile. They can write an occasional op-ed and argue at think-tank seminars. But for now, the party has been hijacked by its broadcast wing. Ann Coulter, Laura Ingraham, Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh, Bill O’Reilly, Glenn Beck, Mark Levin have become the censors of the party. They intimidate its elected officials and will brook nothing they hear from their own wise counselors.
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Republicans Need an English Lesson from Thatcher and Blair
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Before Margaret Thatcher came to power in 1979, Britain was in trouble and headed for worse. The story was told on radio news every morning. Along with the weather and the traffic reports, there was daily a list of trouble spots of a different sort: industrial action.
Industrial action was the euphemism of the time for strikes; most of them unofficial, all of them debilitating. The national mood was sour, the economy perilous, and Britain’s international competitiveness was slipping fast. Commentators around the world talked about “the English disease.”
Thatcher’s challenge was to curb the unions; but before she could do that, she had to convince a doubting nation that the unions could become, or be made, responsible. Over the years, the unions had amassed quite extraordinary power that reached into lives of people who had never thought they were affected by unions.
Union excess was everywhere but because the British believed in the importance of unions, their strengths and excesses were taken as the necessary price for the fundamental right of collective bargaining.
The Labor Party derived much of its support and financing from the union movement. They were structurally entwined: The unions represented the core, or the “base,” of the party. Unfortunately for Labor, the base was toxic and threatened the health of the economy and, as the election of 1979 showed, the electability of the party.
Thatcher, though hard to love, did three enormous things for Britain. She restored the primacy of the free market, curbed union excess and, ironically, saved the Labor Party. Thatcher’s changes made it possible for what was to be called New Labor to modify its relations with its trade union base. The politicians got back the politics, which had been progressively assumed by union bosses of the base.
The British experience is redolent with lessons for the Republican Party. The “base,” represented by the aggressive broadcasters like Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh and Laura Ingraham, is goading the party in Congress to adopt positions that satisfy them, but not the electorate.
Building on the new reality created by Thatcher’s Conservatives, Tony Blair and his political brain, Peter Mandelson, were able to discipline or silence the trade unions in the Labor Party and present an alternative to the Conservatives that could plunder the best ideas of the right. When nobody was looking, Blair must have thanked God for Thatcher.
The agony of the Republicans is clearly on display with the nomination of Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court: To oppose her blindly is to kiss off millions of Hispanic voters, maybe for generations. The party clearly had no strategy to deal with a candidate like Sotamayor. None.
The far right came out with, well, with an old argument: She is a liberal activist. Not much evidence of that, but the conservative talk-show hosts were ready for war. The last war. Or the one before that.
More damaging to serious Republicans has been the conversion, almost entirely on Fox, of respected Republican philosophers into political Vaudevillians. Enter, center stage, Newt Gingrich, Mike Huckabee and Karl Rove. Their collective TV antics are damaging to the movement they once led.
A lot of good thinking about the future of the Republican Party is taking place in the think tanks, particularly the American Enterprise Institute and the Heritage Foundation. But the solid work of restructuring the party for the new realities at home and abroad is drowned out by the eponymous broadcast wing of the party.
It is hard to believe that Newt Gingrich, broadcaster, is the same Newt Gingrich who masterminded the 1994 Republican midterm sweep. Or that Karl Rove was the genius who saw that George W. Bush could be presented as a convincing presidential candidate.
Absent any possibility of reform of the Republican base from the outside, in the Thatcher way, it has to come from the inside. Several astute conservative writers, like David Frum and Mickey Edwards, have lighted a path. A first step down that path could be a more even-handed examination of President Obama’s Supreme Court picks. He could have as many as four of them in his first term. Clearly he has an eye to the electorate, as much as to jurisprudence, if Sotomayor is a harbinger.
Thatcher built herself an entirely new base. Blair dismantled an old one. The Republicans need to examine both.
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The Tricks of Limbaugh’s Trade
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The formula is quite simple really; and it was known many years before Rush Limbaugh ever breathed on a microphone.
It is this: Know your audience’s prejudices. When you know these, blow on them, give them oxygen. Know the frustrations of the audience and articulate them.
British tabloid newspapers have done this for decades. They published editorials that were shrill and polemical, often on the front page. Sometimes the whole paper became the polemic as when, on Nov. 1, 1990, the London Sun blared in its largest type on Page One, “Up Yours Delors,” in response European Commission President Jacques Delors’ supposed attempts to force the Maastricht Treaty upon the United Kingdom. A far leap from the magisterial analysis of most American editorial pages.
However, the restraint of our newspapers is made up for by the abandon of our broadcasters. Hence, Rush Limbaugh and the absurd spectacle of the conservative talk show radio host challenging President Barack Obama to a debate, as though he were really the leader of the opposition. Preposterous, yet entertaining.
Less entertaining, though, for Michael Steele, the newly elected chairman of the Republican National Committee, who had to apologize to Limbaugh for calling him an entertainer and “ugly.” How humiliating for Steele: the sovereign apologizing to the jester.
How discomforting to serious journalist-philosophers of the right, like George Will, Charles Krauthammer and David Brooks. What are they to make of the crude philosophy of Limbaugh, and his sway over the party they have husbanded since the bleak days before Ronald Reagan? Ironically, the best political writers and thinkers of the last 40 years have tended to be from the right rather than the left.
It is unlikely that the philosophical powerhouses of Republicanism will be silenced for long. But they will have to grip with the central weakness of their party. Its appeal is limited to a certain strata of the political body politic: traditional white voters in the upper reaches of the middle class.
To counter this, the Republican Party, indeed the conservative movement, is forever in need of alliances with other groups that can be co-opted for an election or two. These have included the white working-class and the Christian right. And these are, from the conservative point of view, what might be called half-believers—they are on board for some, but not all of the conservative canon.
The white workers feel they are an endangered species, trapped between immigrants and the underclass–to them, loosely, the welfare class. They are scared to look down for fear they will sink and depressed if they look up to a world that requires skills they do not have. Broadcasters like Bill O’Reilly and Limbaugh mine their fears, pump up their jingoism and tell them that they are not alone they have to fight the political Antichrist: socialism. These broadcasters are ready to say it is European evil, planning to take away honest people’s guns and take away freedom.
The appeal to the religious right centers on the abortion issue more than any other. To conservative Christians, it is central to their faith. But is it central to conservatism? This is the fault line between social conservatives and the affluent stalwarts of the party, and those it cultivates with the aid of sympathetic broadcasters like Limbaugh, who keep the faithful faithful.
It is great fun for liberals to see Republicans groveling to an absurd figure like Limbaugh and to savor Steele’s humiliation. But they should be wary of Limbaugh’s strength. While it lasts, it is to punish errant Republicans, like Sen. Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, making bipartisanship in the Senate hard to come by. For now, Limbaugh is a force to be reckoned with on both sides of the aisle.
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The lost art of debate — and other wordy topics
February 6th, 2012
Guests: Aram Bakshian, author and critic; Atul Singh, Fair Observer
Obama’s strengths and weaknesses; the Internet
January 23rd, 2012
Guests: Tim Farley, Sirius XM Radio; Adam Clayton Powell III, University of Southern California; Wayne Madsen, Wayne Madsen Report
A discussion of Shirley’s book, “December 1941: 31 Days That Saved America and Changed the World”
January 16th, 2012
Guest Craig Shirley, author
World events as the U.S. elections get fully underway
January 9th, 2012
Guests Arnaud de Borchgrave, Center for Strategic and International Studies; Andrei Sitov, Itar-Tass; Al Leeds, The Washington Post
The Joys of Transportation
January 2nd, 2012
Guests Bill Gouse, Transportation Consultant – Originally Broadcast October 16, 2011